In Election 2008 Don’t forget the Angry White Man

In election 2008, don’t forget Angry White Man

Aspen Times News
by Gary Hubbell, February 9, 2008

There is a great amount of interest in this year’s presidential elections, as everybody seems to recognize that our next president has to be a lot better than George Bush. The Democrats are riding high with two groundbreaking candidates — a woman and an African-American — while the conservative Republicans are in a quandary about their party’s nod to a quasi-liberal maverick, John McCain.

Each candidate is carefully pandering to a smorgasbord of special-interest groups, ranging from gay, lesbian and transgender people to children of illegal immigrants to working mothers to evangelical Christians.

There is one group no one has recognized, and it is the group that will decide the election: the Angry White Man. The Angry White Man comes from all economic backgrounds, from dirt-poor to filthy rich. He represents all geographic areas in America, from urban sophisticate to rural redneck, deep South to mountain West, left Coast to Eastern Seaboard.

His common traits are that he isn’t looking for anything from anyone — just the promise to be able to make his own way on a level playing field. In many cases, he is an independent businessman and employs several people. He pays more than his share of taxes and works hard.

The victimhood syndrome buzzwords — “disenfranchised,”

“marginalized” and “voiceless” — don’t resonate with him. “Press ‘one’ for English” is a curse-word to him.

He’s used to picking up the tab, whether it’s the company Christmas party, three sets of braces, three college educations or a beautiful wedding.

He believes the Constitution is to be interpreted literally, not as a “living document” open to the whims and vagaries of a panel of judges who have never worked an honest day in their lives.

The Angry White Man owns firearms, and he’s willing to pick up a gun to defend his home and his country. He is willing to lay down his life to defend the freedom and safety of others, and the thought of killing someone who needs killing really doesn’t bother him.

The Angry White Man is not a metrosexual, a homosexual or a victim. Nobody like him drowned in Hurricane Katrina — he got his people together and got the hell out, then went back in to rescue those too helpless and stupid to help themselves, often as a police officer, a National Guard soldier or a volunteer firefighter.

His last name and religion don’t matter. His background might be Italian, English, Polish, German, Slavic, Irish, or Russian, and he might have Cherokee, Mexican, or Puerto Rican mixed in, but he considers himself a white American.

He’s a man’s man, the kind of guy who likes to play poker, watch football, hunt white-tailed deer, call turkeys, play golf, spend a few bucks at a strip club once in a blue moon, change his own oil and build things. He coaches baseball, soccer and football teams and doesn’t ask for a penny. He’s the kind of guy who can put an addition on his house with a couple of friends, drill an oil well, weld a new bumper for his truck, design a factory and publish books. He can fill a train with 100,000 tons of coal and get it to the power plant on time so that you keep the lights on and never know what it took to flip that light switch.

Women either love him or hate him, but they know he’s a man, not a dishrag. If they’re looking for someone to walk all over, they’ve got the wrong guy. He stands up straight, opens doors for women and says “Yes, sir”

and “No, ma’am.”

He might be a Republican and he might be a Democrat; he might be a Libertarian or a Green. He knows that his wife is more emotional than rational, and he guides the family in a rational manner.

He’s not a racist, but he is annoyed and disappointed when people of certain backgrounds exhibit behavior that typifies the worst stereotypes of their race.

He’s willing to give everybody a fair chance if they work hard, play by the rules and learn English.

Most important, the Angry White Man is pissed off.

When his job site becomes flooded with illegal workers who don’t pay taxes and his wages drop like a stone, he gets righteously angry. When his job gets shipped overseas, and he has to speak to some incomprehensible idiot in India for tech support, he simmers. When Al Sharpton comes on TV, leading some rally for reparations for slavery or some such nonsense, he bites his tongue and he remembers. When a child gets charged with carrying a concealed weapon for mistakenly bringing a penknife to school, he takes note of who the local idiots are in education and law enforcement.

He also votes, and the Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader. It’s not that she is a woman. It’s that she is who she is.

It’s the liberal victim groups she panders to, the “poor me” attitude that she represents, her inability to give a straight answer to an honest question, his tax dollars that she wants to give to people who refuse to do anything for themselves.

There are many millions of Angry White Men. Four million Angry White Men are members of the National Rifle Association, and all of them will vote against Hillary Clinton, just as the great majority of them voted for George Bush.

He hopes that she will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, and he will make sure that she gets beaten like a drum.

3 Comments on “In Election 2008 Don’t forget the Angry White Man”

I guess I generally fit your angry white man category, except with respect to immigration. I don’t have any problem with anybody else working hard to make a better life for themselves. But I would be even angrier if we became even more of the kind of society where authorities stop people to check our papers to figure out if we are legal. My ancestors fought beside George Washington and now some upstart bureaucrat is going to ask me, on demand, to prove *my* right to be here?

My economics run more in line with those of Hayek and Friedman, and less in line with the Marxist view that laissez-faire capitalism keeps the working man down–but I understand that there are a lot of angry people who like that populist line of reasoning and think that wealth is a matter of preventing other people from making deals freely with whomever they want. And a lot of them are even convinced that the idea is conservative.

Ross Perot was wrong that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking sound” as manufacturing jobs left the nation. It actually did just the opposite and helped reverse a long-term loss in US manufacturing jobs for five years after it was passed. What killed US manufacturing recently was the protective import tariff on steel. It may have protected the steel industry, and even that is questionable, but we lost jobs in every industry where steel is used. We didn’t start to gain jobs overall again until the protective tariff was repealed.

As an angry white Southern man, I remember that the South had stalled under the economic protectionism of Jim Crow, and that the economic rebirth of the South began when those laws were overturned. I only wish we had had the moral fiber to have done it on our own. A job is nothing more than work that is valuable enough to be worth doing, so the whole notion that one group of people can take jobs away from another group depends on the flawed idea that there is only a limited amount of good to be done in the world, so that if one person does something good and becomes successful, then it necessarily prevents someone else from also finding something good to do.

The new protectionist agenda is that the cross-border employer/employee relationship is reversed. To turn the US away from being the capitalist employer of the world’s labor into being socialist drones all dependent on foreign employers. Won’t we all be rich then? And these Limbaughs and Vigueries and Tancredos think this vision is conservative. The reason people come here for work is because this is where we have the capital that makes their labor more productive and therefore more valuable.

There is nothing magical about the US border such that when the protectionists have succeeded in driving our capital out that we won’t therefore decline in per-capita productivity and therefore also in per-capita wealth.

As an angry white man, I know that any time there is any “targeted” benefit or burden, that I will be the guy who picks up the tab and never the one targeted to benefit. So, in my view, the more freedom we have, and the less statism in the name of populism and the misguided attempt to get richer by making others poorer, the better. I believe in some level of support for those who strive and fail, but the vast majority of people should be expected to pull their own weight, to produce more value than they consume and to pay their own way. If you have to coerce someone into hiring you, then you aren’t pulling your own weight.

People who are wealthier have more economic choices and more economic power. They can use this power to their advantage. So wealth tends to trickle up, and burdens always trickle down. So I think we are better off to try to let poor people get wealther and to stop trying to make rich people poorer. A virtuous cycle of wealth arising from freedom. You won’t make a better life by erecting economic barriers to the less fortunate or by erecting barriers against the more fortunate either. With rare exceptions, economic barriers against anybody, in the long run, end up helping nobody.